Bail Out The Teachers!

Ten years ago I taught this guy Tom Scaramellino, who was scary smart. He loved History and Science. To be accurate, I should say he loved Science and History. I took him to a play called Copenhagen, a drama that dramatically explored the work that Niels Bohr did in inventing Quantum Theory. I asked Tom for some help in understanding Quantum Theory. As Tom endeavored to make the strange familiar to me, I said something like, “Quantum Theory is so unsettling.” I remember that Tom then quoted a Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, to put me more at ease: “Quantum Theory appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone—both the novice and to the experienced physicist.” Thank you Tom for helping me deal with the iridescent bubble of Quantum Theory. Indeed, in the play Copenhagen (and by the way it was so staged in an exciting way—seriously—it was if the meeting of two physicists took place in limbo or purgatory, and some of the audience sat on the stage behind the action, “judging” the men. Guess where I was!! On the stage—I spent half the time learning, okay a third of the time posing for the audience, a third of the time processing what this Quantum Theory might be, and a third of the time staring at the audience—Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller in the front row!!) Niels Bohr’s character said, “If it does not boggle your mind [it, meaning, again, Quantum Theory], you understand nothing.”

Well. Good. It did boggle. It does boggle. And then you go deeper into it, what with that Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, of reality changing when we try to observe it, and of paradoxes where cats are neither alive nor dead till someone looks at them.

Quantum Strangeness. I don’t claim to be the author of that phrase. Just another way people look at it and try and make sense of it. I even remember seeing in bookstores such titles like “Quantum Telepathy,” “Quantum ESP,” and thanks to Deepak Chopra, “Quantum Healing.”

What in the world am I getting at?

Well, as I catch up on some current events reading from December, since I was enjoying my American flight of fancy, I am still stuck on all those articles about how the US federal government took dramatic new steps to halt the collapse of the financial system, pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue Citigroup and others, and hundreds of billions to purchase toxic debts and pump cash into frozen credit markets.

The plan just reminded me of Quantum Theory. Rumors and paradoxes and moves peculiar and mysterious. And Boggling. And Strange. And hopefully Healing. This rescue, in case you missed all this news, marks the biggest federal bail-out ever. But we were cautioned that we couldn’t let Citigroup fail—it could take the entire financial system with it.

It got me to thinking of all the people who won’t be benefiting from this bail-out. Oh yes, we are all a part of the whole, and all that, but really, I got a little tickled (almost—a sober tickle) at the stories I have seen about financial analysts giving up a 4th car, or letting a maid go, or terminating a time-share in the Hamptons. We were awash in how we had to tighten our belts.

You are talking to a teacher—we know from belt-tightening. It isn’t just a function of the downturn in 2008. We know belt-tightening. It’s really what we know best about careers and economics.

Surely you have heard a classic conversation between a teacher and a non-teacher:
Oh, you teach. I thought of teaching. But, I wanted to make money instead.
Or
I was told I was too smart to be a teacher.

The bail-out of financial institutions and the automotive industries has reminded me that there has long been (always been?) a national problem of respect where being a teacher has become so widely associated with mediocrity that we are the stuff of common jokes.

My friends, (as the nation’s most famous “loser,” John McCain, likes to begin his appeals—I am not trying to bring up red-state/blue-state tensions, simply reminding us that the butt of economic jokes has kinda always been the teacher) in these times of plummeting consumer confidence and evaporating labor markets, it is time to address the problem head on. We must now go boldly forward. I suggest that we do something daring, and appropriate, and bail out the teachers.

What would such a bail-out consist of? I have been working on this. There has been much talk comparing President Obama’s first Hundred Days with the first Hundred Days of President Franklin Roosevelt. (By the way I am reading a great book about these very days, a book that was reputedly on President-Elect Obama’s nightstand during November and December—Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope).

In the 1930s FDR created his Federal Writers’ Project and Federal Theater project. These projects put money into the hands of creative types whose work had dried up during the Depression. They had to produce something, actually they were directed to “capture the American scene.” But I am actually thinking of another of Roosevelt’s legacy for the teacher bail-out. What about the AAA—Agricultural Adjustment Administration? This entity recognized that an overcapacity of farms and farm produce was driving down crop prices, and that elimination of that overcapacity was needed.

Hmmm…teachers start at somewhere between $23,000-$37,000 a year. I now make just about what my best friend in college in made his first year as a law school graduate—back in 1989. I learned recently that A-Rod will make approximately $42,000 every time he steps up to bat this season. Wow.

So, let’s get down to business. What should this bail-out look like? What would I need to take care of me? (And I promise not to fly to Washington on a chartered plane to hold my cup for the bail-out.)

I would like $400,000. That would give me enough to throw myself an AIG-style party to celebrate.

How many teachers are there in the US? I spent some time on the internet—I was on hallway duty in the dorm, so it didn’t really take time away from the heavy lifting. I discovered the approximate number of teachers in the US of public and private schools, and $400,000 is about what an average teacher makes in 10 years. If we multiply the $400,000 times the number of teachers—we get a total bail-out cost of less than $800 billion. That’s not far from what the government will pay for the financial and insurance institutions. If this number is still too big to swallow, let me ask point blank: whom would you rather bail out, a teacher or an insurance executive?

Of course putting this kind of money on the table would require the strictest of oversight.

Hey, that’s what teachers do anyway—strict oversight of the young. NFL player Curtis Martin once said of his third-grade teacher: “She was really hard on me. At first I thought she was mean. Then I realized she cared. That made me care.”

Most of what teachers do appears to be a technical exercise—but, of course, it is all about discovering things about yourself. It is peculiar, and mysterious, and the borders boggle the mind. I feel a little Quantum Theory coming back in with all the paradoxes and thrills and hopes and new frontiers.

There is a musical called The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N and one of the teachers sang, “If you want to be an ever-lovin’ teacher, you gotta be out of your ever-lovin’ mind.”

I don’t mean to make too lightly about safeguarding our financial system. I also just want to remind us that in the words of Sir William Osler, “No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.”

I am sure the check is in the mail.